If you are Diane Nash, a Nashville college student who also just happens to be the co-founder of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the most important organizations of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and you've just learned that the first pair of bus riders, "The Freedom Riders" organized by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and departed from Washington D.C., have been stopped outside of Birmingham, Alabama; the first bus by a mob in Anniston, Alabama led by the Klu Klux Klan who have burned it to the ground and clubbed it's occupants on the side of the road, and the second bus halted at the city terminal where it's occupants were savagely beaten by a mob aided by the local police chief, you are not dissuaded or discouraged from continuing the campaign to test an earlier Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel; you are emboldened to press on!
Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts also included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters, personally focusing on segregated Nashville, Tennessee, and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project as well as working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement, but she was just getting started that late evening in May of 1961, then a student at Nashville's FISK University, and the Attorney General of the United States was alarmed that the CORE bus riders had nearly been killed that day yet he had learned in conversations with Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, himself a civil rights activist and a co-founder of The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and from conversations with Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, that another set of activist bus riders were preparing late at night to depart Nashville bound directly to continue "The Freedom Ride" where it had been stopped the heavy hand of racist hate the day before.
So the heated question from RFK to John Seigenthaler in his late night phone call direct to his New Orleans motel room was not rooted in anger as much as it was in fear and wonderment that the student activists were willing to continue and risk certain injury or even death.
Robert F. Kennedy had almost certainly hoped that there would be an opportunity for the events of the Birmingham beatings of the bus riders to cool down, and for the movement to take a needed break, to reassess, and maybe to perhaps consider another way to cast light on the deep south's non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960). Instead he found himself in the unenviable position late that night in May of 1961 of having to insert himself directly into the middle of the fight.
Personal feelings the Kennedy's may have had about the segregationist hate of some in the deep south, they were at the forefront - politicians, men who had narrowly won the election just a few months earlier by doing the improbable, winning the southern states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. John Kennedy's infamous inaugural speech in fact never mentioned segregation, civil rights or race as he stirred the crowd and the nation with his first phrase - "We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom" - a definite tribute to liberty that stopped short of as much as what the leaders of the civil rights movement would have liked to have heard.
In Birmingham Reverend Shuttlesworth said it best from his pulpit "What a wonderful president we have now," in an ad-hoc tribute to Kennedy where he coyly pointed out one of two conspicuous white members in the audience, members of a police intelligence squad sent by the racist Chief of Police Bull Connor to monitor the meeting "This is Detective Jones, he voted for Nixon like all the other white people." He continued "Ike never did nothing for the Negros in the eight years he was in there," he said. "No negro ever played golf with Ike."
And so it was from this footing that the famous Hyannis Port touch football playing brother of the president had to plan his steps carefully to help solve the growing crisis without sacrificing crucial political ground that would be needed in the next election.
The importance and significance of his phone call that night cannot be understated; he was committed to seeing "The Freedom Riders" end their journey safely in New Orleans because in fact he had already made it clear as he assumed his position at the Department of Justice, that voting rights were the strongest political and moral opportunity in the field of civil rights. He had shown his hand to this fact when he announced to John Doar, a Senior Republican holdover from the previous administration, now assuming the new role as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, "I want to move on voting!"
Kennedy was ready and aiming for a fight and the fate of "The Freedom Riders" would shock the nation's conscience and inspire other subsequent civil rights movement actions following Martin Luther King Jr's example of non-violent protest. Votes after all are what win elections.
SNCC activist undergoing training for planned lunch counter integration
The Attorney General continued "call her and tell her what is waiting for the Freedom Riders in Alabama!" This was a dire warning as he had learned from an FBI briefing that in fact worse violence was being planned should more bus riders from the north attempt the same. So Seigenthaler called her.
May 16, 1961
"I understand that there are more freedom riders coming down from Nashville to Birmingham, you must stop them if you can!"
"They are not going to stop or turnaround, they will be there soon" she said.
Seigenthaler raised his voice "Young lady do you understand what you are doing, do you understand that you are going to get someone killed?"
With that she replied "Sir you should know, we all signed our last will and testaments last night before they left. We know someone will be killed, but we cannot let violence overcome non-violence."
As Seigenthaler liked to tell it in years to come, 'there I was on the phone that night, a strong adult male member of the presidents staff calling this young female student activist on the phone, and in the end, it was she who gave me the lecture.'
The phone calls from Washington to the front line of the civil rights movement didn't begin with this call and nor did they end, quite the opposite. But in fact it was a crisis so early in the new Kennedy administration that it forced them to reveal their hand once the cards had been dealt in Alabama long before they intended and soon after the buses were rolling again from Nashville they had calls to make to the other side - calls not surprisingly that went unanswered - but that is another part of the story.
I imagined, as I understand the story of the hands-on approach Robert Kennedy would ultimately take in managing the complicated non-violent demonstration of the bus riders, who simply wanted to prove that segregated public buses were unconstitutional and that the southern states had no right to ignore the rulings of the federal government by not enforcing the law, that there would have been enormous pressure on these two men in the middle of that night to make bold and correct decisions to see the matter through to a successful conclusion. They eagerly wanted to avoid continued bloodshed by the participants and escalating negative public opinion on how the new administration was handing it's first major crises. It was a phone call that didn't carry the same weight as the one from Trump to Romney, it carried the weight of the fate of the nation's intolerance for racial segregation, discrimination and unequal rights of African American citizens of the United Sates of America.